Browsing Department of Marketing (MARKETING/AØ) by Year Published

A Consumer Neuroscience Study of Information Processing of Brand Advertisements and the Store Environment in Compulsive Buying

Bagdziunaite, Dalia(Frederiksberg, 2018)

[More information]

[Less information]

Abstract:

Background. Compulsive buying—defined as excessive, uncontrolled, and repetitive buying—
is a serious problem in today’s society, driven by consumeristic values and reinforced by
marketing efforts. However, the research on the external influences (e.g., brand information) and
underlying processes that explain consumer behavior in brand-manifesting situations in
compulsive buying is relatively scarce. This thesis provides an integrative literature review and
two experimental studies that yield cross-disciplinary insights into the compulsive buying
phenomenon. The thesis aims to study the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses that
characterize consumer-brand interactions at relevant brand touchpoints in compulsive buying.
Research methodology. Two experimental studies investigate similarities and differences
between two groups of consumers with high and low compulsive buying tendencies (CBTs) at
two brand touchpoints that represent a pre-purchase and purchase phase of the consumer
journey. Multimodal consumer neuroscience tools (i.e., eye-tracker, EEG, and EDA) are
employed to collect neurophysiological and physiological responses during exposure to
marketing information. The first study examines consumer information processing of
advertisements during a simulated TV commercial-viewing experiment. The second study
investigates consumer information processing of store environments during a field experiment
conducted in two single-brand fashion-apparel stores (i.e., low-end vs. high-end).
Findings. The findings from the first study indicate that, regardless of their CBT level,
consumers tend to allocate a relatively equal amount of cognitive resources to attend to, process,
and remember exposed advertising information during the entire duration of commercial
viewing. The two groups differed in their visual processing of brand elements only when
viewing advertisements related to social cause. In the consumer group with a high CBT, a higher
cognitive workload was linked to a lower probability of subsequent brand recognition. The
findings from the second study revealed that, regardless of the fashion-store type, consumers
with a high CBT chose items that were more expensive than consumers with a low CBT. The
changes in physiological arousal during the first minute of shopping showed that, although both
consumer groups were more emotionally responsive to the high-end than the low-end fashion store, the emotional receptivity in both groups was expressed in different physiological
responses. Specifically, consumers with a high CBT demonstrated a higher frequency and a
shorter duration of emotional responses, whereas consumers with a low CBT showed a higher
amplitude of emotional responses in the high-end fashion store than in the low-end fashion
store. The results indicate that there are two potentially different mechanisms that occur in the
two consumer groups during encounters with store information.
Conclusions. This thesis provides theoretical, methodological, managerial, and societal
contributions. This research highlights the fact that compulsive buying is a complex
phenomenon and that researchers should address both internal and external influences, examine
the unconscious processes and mechanisms, and study consumer responses to marketing
information in more naturalistic settings. The thesis also promotes the integration of consumer
neuroscience tools with the compulsive buying research practice, aims to increase the awareness
of the problem of compulsive buying, and encourages the development of novel, technologybased
and scientifically driven consumer-behavior-monitoring policies.

Files in this item: 1

Retail stores are designed to attract and inspire consumers. They also function as communication
platforms between brand and consumer. Customers, both consciously and unconsciously, decode
messages embedded in the store design, and use them in their decision-making. But how can
design managers know with any certainty whether the choices they make actually add value, to
the products in the store? This dilemma has been addressed from varying perspectives in businessrelated
design and marketing literature. John Heskett (2005) acknowledges the conflict of
imperatives that obtains between a company and the users of its products and ascribes to design
the role of providing a bridge between them. Philip Kotler (1973) underscores the need for
designers to understand the targeted consumers by making a distinction between intended and
perceived atmosphere. The intended atmosphere is, of course, the set of sensory qualities that the
designer of an environment means to invoke. But a design is not always perceived as intended;
indeed, perception can vary significantly from one customer to the next. Apart from offering
insights in the retail designer’s process of creating stores that function as a marketing tool, this
dissertation proposes a method for measuring whether decisions made by the store designer do
indeed support the products from the targeted consumer’s perspective. In four articles, a toolbox
is provided, offering insights of four types: (1) the theoretical and empirical, aimed at developing
an understanding of the different categories within the retail designer's working process; (2) a
codification of the stakeholders and constraint generators affecting the retail design process; (3)
the proposal of a new method for studying spillover effects from store interior to product; and (4)
the testing of this method in two field experiments, where we measure the effects of retail design
on those for whom the design is ultimately intended: consumers.

Files in this item: 1

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the links between employee attitudes, customer loyalty and business results.
Methodology/approach – From a conceptual point of view, this employee-customer-business results chain is well founded and generally accepted, also in the European Excellence Model. But for many companies, it seems difficult to demonstrate such links, and several issues must be addressed to uncover the links. To investigate these links empirically, a hotel chain provided data matching employee and customer measures with measures of profit, and a modeling approach is developed.
Findings – The model is successfully applied. As it is possible to estimate and test the links, we have demonstrated the effects of employee attitudes on customer loyalty and further on business results. The findings provide strong empirical evidence for the developed model, and the study provided evidence of theemployee-customer-business result chain.
Research limitations – The study is limited to four hotels in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Practical implications – The research findings provide a better understanding of the employee-customer-business result chain and may help practitioners in improving company financial performance.
Originality/value – This paper provides new insights into the relationships between employee attitudes, customer loyalty, and business results.

Files in this item: 1

This thesis discusses customers’ engagement behaviors (CEB) in the context of
continuous service relationships (telecommunication provider and financial services’
provider). CEB manifestations are agreed in literature and in business to be a potential source
of value for the firm and valuable contributions have been made, mainly focusing at
antecedents for CEB, the various CEB behaviors and consequences of CEB. Extant literature
adopts mainly a firm-centric perspective and tends to be conceptual.
This research adopts a customer-centric perspective. The methodology is qualitative and
is performed via semi-structured in-depth interviews with individuals resulting in 40 touchpoint
histories about their service relationships with their telecommunication provider and
financial services provider. Furthermore, are qualitative data collected at the
telecommunication firm, in terms of interviews with employees and participant observations
at touch-points.
CEB are definitely found to be potential sources for value-creation for the firm. CEB can
however at times destroy value or cause lost CEB value (when CEB initiatives by the firm are
not returned).
From the perspective of customers are CEB manifestations part of their everyday Life.
Customers manifest CEB to obtain a certain goal, sometimes targeted the firm, and sometimes
targeted a group external to the firm. Customers manifest CEB by adopting a certain
interaction style to facilitate goal achievement, and the way customers manifest CEB are
sometimes inconsistent and follows not necessarily pre-figured sequences.
Customers’ CEB manifestations co-exist with the experiences customers have in their
service relationships. CEB is sometimes manifested by customers to re-experience, reinforce
or challenge what the customer is currently / has been experiencing. CEB is as well
sometimes embedded in the service relationship to a degree, where customers’ experiences
and CEB become deeply intertwined or even become one and same construct, and sometimes
is a CEB manifestation a consequence of a certain customer experience.
CEB has changed the service relationship, and some of the recognized cornerstones in
what constitutes a service relationship are challenged. This thesis suggests that CEB manifestations
turn the service relationship into a plethora of (service) events of sometimes conflicting
valence, which might disrupt the value creation process intended by the firm. This might be
the reality of ‘the new service relationship’.
These obvious managerial challenges are best solved by the firm, when the firm adopts a
customer-centric approach and understands which situation(s) their customers are most
frequently in (revolving around the firm). The firm should investigate which touch-points are
relevant contingent the customer situation and finally how the touch-points could be best
possible organized to stimulate for favorable CEB. This novel managerial concept is labeled
‘customer arenas’.

Traditionally, tourists spend their holidays in tourist spaces that provide the needed infrastructure for their experiences (i.e., hotels, restaurants, sight-seeing spots). However, nowadays tourists often occupy more residential space than in the past; this development is fuelled at least by two important trends in tourism. First, destination marketing organizations (DMO’s) increasingly seek to intertwine tourists‘ paths with local neighbourhood in order to create perceived tourist authenticity (e.g. the ‘localhood’ strategy of various city tourism organizations; Wonderful Copenhagen, 2017). Second, shared economy offerings, such as Airbnb, create tourist spaces in residential areas (Gutierrez et al., 2017). Both developments result in the integration of tourists into the residents’ living sphere, and anecdotal evidence indicates that this does not come without fraction between residents and tourists (e.g., Andereck et al., 2005; Gutierrez et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2013).

Files in this item: 1

Exploring the Role of sensemaking Narratives in Stakeholders’ Shared Understanding of the Brand

Gyrd-Jones, Richard; Törmälä, Minna(Frederiksberg, 2017)

[More information]

[Less information]

Abstract:

Purpose: An important part of how we sense a brand is how we make sense of a brand. Sense-making is naturally strongly connected to how we cognize about the brand. But sense-making is concerned with multiple forms of knowledge that arise from our interpretation of the brand-related stimuli: Declarative, episodic, procedural and sensory. Knowledge is given meaning through mental association (Keller, 1993) and / or symbolic interaction (Blumer, 1969). These meanings are centrally related to individuals’ sense of identity or “identity needs” (Wallpach & Woodside, 2009). The way individuals make sense of brands is related to who people think they are in their context and this shapes what they enact and how they interpret the brand (Currie & Brown, 2003; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005; Weick, 1993). Our subject of interest in this paper is how stakeholders interpret and ascribe meaning to the brand and how these meaning narratives play out over time to create meta-narratives that drive brand meaning co-creation. In this paper we focus on the concept of brand identity since it is at the level of identity that the brand creates meaning for individuals (Kapferer, 2012; Csaba & Bengtsson, 2006).

This paper examines the links between employee attitudes, customer loyalty and company profitability. From a conceptual point of view, this employee-customer-profit chain, also known as the service-profit chain, is well founded and generally accepted. But for many companies, it seems difficult to demonstrate such links, and several issues must be addressed to uncover the links. To investigate these links empirically, a hotel chain provided data matching employee and customer measures with measures of profitability. We have successfully employed a modeling approach, and the paper reports empirical evidence of the employee-customer-profit chain. As it is possible to estimate the links, we have demonstrated their effect on company profitability. The research findings provide a better understanding of the service-profit chain and may help practitioners in improving company financial performance.

Most studies in marketing operate at a market level, which also becomes frequently the condition
for design work. This means that the aggregate or weighted average consumer is the focus. Having
already made this aggregation as the “top-down approach” indicates, it is not feasible to take the
individuals apart and explore how they differ individually. This is so because already the concepts
and the methodology are founded at the aggregate level. The differences have been eliminated and
replaced by an assumed normal distribution or similar. We depart from that and start our
investigations at an individual level. This means, in the “bottom up” approach we keep the
individual variation or differences intact for further analysis. We base our concept and methodology
at the individual level. Only then, understanding what happens for the single individual we can
eventually aggregate to see the consequences at a market level. We explore a procedure that enables
the marketer to estimate the effect of a marketing message like a mission statement in a logo at the
level of a single individual. This is a prior to market test, with its own realism. The procedure can
easily be extended to products, where both quality and price (willingness to pay) are issues and it
can also be used as a follow-up after the round of pre-test.
To satisfy individual users, real individuals should be considered in their heterogeneity. Relevant
psychological and statistical methods and reasoning are useful in keeping the trace of the individual.
In the bottom up approach we measure how much the influence of a treatment like that of facing a
particular design influences each human being. Successively, one may see if other behavioural
characteristics also unite for instance those who are heavily affected or those who are not. Then a
new behavioural based community may appear.

Qualitative studies are associated with interviews, focus groups and
observations. We introduce experiments as a way of dealing with such studies. In
contrast to the common focus on how many respondents choose a particular
behaviour we focus on how much a design affect the individual. This is often
concerned with analysing the effect of a design. The approach is bottom up, in that
the inferences are concerned with each individual. This enables us to look at the
variation between people. We consider the common preference profile, defined as
that part of the individual preference profiles which is shared by all individuals. A
variation seen by the individual means that the message is received with its
complexity and meaningfulness, while a big ideosyncratic variations means people
understand different things and a Babylonian confusion is the outcome. Findings may
be generalized after the effect has been measured at an individual level.

Challenging Customers not only responds to increasing demands among
customers challenging their suppliers but also to the suppliers’ drive to
challenge customers. Challenging each other in a customer-supplier
relationship helps both parties stay sharp, alert, and agile. Challenging in
relationships – and challenging the relationship itself – are therefore
sources of competitiveness for customers and suppliers alike.
A business without customers is not a business. All firms need to interact
with “the one who pays”, “the one for which they are valuable”, or “the
beneficiary of the firm’s value proposition”. Such customer contacts and
contracts can be direct or indirect, arm’s length or trust based, simple or
complex. In all cases, firms have relationships with customers. In our
understanding, the term “relationship” does not imply a specific quality,
such as “friendship” or even “good” or “bad”. Rather, it indicates that the
parties somehow relate to one another. “Customer-supplier relationship”
describes the fact that companies interact with each other in order to
enable value creation on both ends of the relationship.
The establishment of relationships is therefore not a choice for a
company, but a necessity. However, ensuring that the firm is involved in
suitable customer-supplier relationships that support its competitiveness is
a challenging task and a daily challenge. This book provides a 360-degree
view of customer-supplier relationships, and offers tools useful for
describing and understanding relationships in order to develop them into
valuable assets for the firm. Notably, the book is not a complete collection
of all of the models and tools ever suggested. Rather, it offers our
selection of tools that have been proven to work over time.

Files in this item: 1

Qualitative value profiling (QVP) is a relatively unknown method of strategic analysis for companies in international business-to-business settings. The purpose of QVP is to reduce the information complexity that is faced by international companies in dealing with business partners. The QVP method allows the development of 1) profiles of the target country in which operations are to take place, 2) profiles of the buying center (i.e. the group of decision makers) in the partner company, and 3) profiles of the product/service offering. It also allows the development of a semantic scaling method for deeper analysis of all involved factors. This paper presents the method and compares and contrasts it with other similar methods like the PESTELE method known from corporate strategy, the STEEPAL method known from scenario analysis, and the Politics-Institutions-Economy (PIE) framework known from International Business. This comparison suggests that QVP on most accounts provides deeper insights than alternative methods and thus lays the foundation for better strategic planning in international business-to-business markets. Hence, it is a valuable addition to the toolbox of business strategists and consequently, for the advancement of international development. Further use of QVP is recommended and suggestions for future research are provided.

The presented study utilizes data collected from an extensive real world concept
selection process in new product development (NPD), to investigate whether
department specific dominant logics and competences influence the selections made
by a marketing department, and what might be driving this logic. The study
specifically investigates the impact of the departmental viewpoint onto idea selection
in the innovation process, by comparing the selections made by the marketing
department (n=31) with those of R&D (n=25) and company executives (n=8). In the
NPD project seven concepts were screened for continuation through an individual
pairwise comparison, to test eight hypotheses all based on h0: There is no difference
between the innovations selected by marketing, R&D, and executive groups. Through
an analysis of the between-department variance h0 was rejected (F(12, 366)= 2.312,
p<.001), and the results from the eight following hypotheses lend support to extending
the concept of dominant logics to the department level, providing some explanations
for the large variance found in the evaluation of the three groups. The reported
findings have important managerial implications, as they point to which type of logic,
and thereby screening of ideas, can be achieved based on which departments are
involved in the critical selection of ideas and concepts for continuation in NPD.

Files in this item: 1

This dissertation contributes to the strategic cognition research by exploring how
managers’ cognitive representations of an emerging, but potentially disruptive
technology, influence their identification of strategic options. Managers tend to talk of
social media as technology that changes customer behavior and disrupts industries,
however, this attitude is not reflected in their strategic framing and implementation of
social media. As behavioral theory seems inadequate to account for such paradox of
social media sensemaking, two qualitative studies purposefully account for the sociocognitive
challenges of understanding and using new, disruptive technology in
business-customer interaction and provide theoretical frameworks for overcoming
barriers to business transformation in the digital age.
Departing from a thorough review within the marketing and business management
disciplines, the studies illustrate how managers’ strategic perspective is delimited, at
the subconscious level, by experience, knowledge, and assumptions of businesscustomer
interaction, market dynamics, and social media acumen, and how these
biases are often confirmed in a social context instead of being challenged, despite of a
market-driven, as well as an organizational demand of rethinking. Elicitation of the
underlying conceptual structures of social media is based on in-depth interviews with
39 strategic decision-makers on B2C markets in Europe and the US. The first study
across companies empirically investigates how strategic decision-makers cognize,
formulate, and implement social media differently, and how managers’ cognitive
understandings of social media are acquired. A detailed study within a media company
further demonstrates how managers’ identified strategic framings of social media can
express different operations of conceptual change of strategies through reflective
thinking as higher-order learning. These framing operations can be the basis for
discovering possible reorganizations of strategies (strategic reframing) to become
aware of new opportunities with social media.
The identification of the conceptual structures underlying managers’ strategic
cognition of social media through mental models and framing mechanisms contributes
to the discussion of how strategic cognition of social media can strengthen the
development of business and customer value, as well as individual and organizational
capabilities. The findings lead to more nuanced understandings of the microfoundations
of strategy at the intersected levels of management, cognition, market, and
media. To my knowledge, this is the first attempt to comprehensively capture the variety of conceptual representations of social media at managerial level, and to
theoretically and empirically account for how these socio-cognitive operations
underpin a strategic change process involving social media at organizational level.
The findings suggest how reflective thinking - at individual and collective levels - can
help strategists and companies to better meet future challenges of adopting new
technologies. The ability to challenge own and others’ assumptions through reflective
thinking can be initiated through reframing techniques and models developed from this
research. Such practices become important to establish when businesses become
increasingly dependent on fast-moving technology. Strategic processing becomes a
critical precondition for understanding the nature of change and transformation and to
be able to relate to customers in an appropriate manner.

Files in this item: 1

In this paper, we suggest that many of the choice situations confronting consumers in the modern marketplace have become supra-complex. Supra-complex decision-making occurs when the perceived difficulty of transforming product information into knowledge exceeds the expected benefits of doing so, even if decision-making heuristics, or other kind of attribute-related decision rules, are applied. Under conditions of supra-complexity, we propose that consumers instead use mental markers in order to justify their decisions. Mental markers are any mental construct the consumer uses for the purpose of gaining mental justification of overall choices. We argue that the usage of mental markers leads to reductions in cognitive dissonance, reduced usage of mental resources and time. Drawing on the principle of mental justification as well as consumers’ propensity to use goals as blueprints for directing their behaviour, we propose a framework for understanding consumer decisions when faced with supra-complexity.